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Plikt stood beside Ender's bed because she could not bear to sit, could not bear to move. He was going to die without uttering another word. She had followed him, had given up home and family to be near him, and what had he said to her? Yes, he let her be his shadow sometimes; yes, she was a silent observer of many of his conversations over the past few weeks and months. But when she tried to speak to him of things more personal, of deep memories, of what he meant by the things that he had done, he only shook his head and said--kindly, because he was kind, but firmly also because he did not wish her to misunderstand--said to her, "Plikt, I'm not a teacher anymore."
Yes you are, she wanted to say to him. Your books go on teaching even where you have never been. The Hive Queen, The Hegemon, and already The Life of Human seems likely to take its place beside them. How can you say you're through with teaching, when there are other books to write, other deaths to speak? You have spoken the deaths of killers and saints, aliens, and once the death of a whole city swallowed up in a cataclysmic volcano. But in telling these stories of others, where was your story, Andrew Wiggin? How can I speak your death if you never explained it to me?
Or is this your last secret--that you never knew any more about the people whose deaths you spoke than I know about you today. You force me to invent, to guess, to wonder, to imagine--is this what you also did? Discover the most widely believed story, then find an alternate explanation that made sense to others and had meaning and the power to transform, and then tell that tale--even though it was also a fiction, and no truer than the story everyone believed? Is that what I must say as I speak the death of the Speaker for the Dead? His gift was not to discover truth, it was to invent it; he did not unfold, unknot, untwist the lives of the dead, he created them. And so I create his. His sister says he died because he tried to follow his wife with perfect loyalty, into the life of peace and seclusion that she hungered for; but the very peace of that life killed him, for his aiua was drawn into the lives of the strange children that sprang fullgrown from his mind, and his old body, despite all the years most likely left in it, was discarded because he hadn't the time to pay enough attention to keep the thing alive.
He wouldn't leave his wife or let her leave him; so he was bored to death and hurt her worse by staying with her than he ever would have done by letting her go without him.
There, is that brutal enough, Ender? He wiped out the hive queens of dozens of worlds, leaving only one survivor of that great and ancient people. He also brought her back to life. Does saving the last of your victims atone for having slain the others? He did not mean to do it, that is his defense; but dead is dead, and when the life is cut off in its prime, does the aiua say, Ah, but the child who killed me, he thought that he was playing a game, so my death counts less, it weighs less? No, Ender himself would have said, no, the death weighs the same, and I carry that weight on my shoulders. No one has more blood on their hands than I have; so I will speak with brutal truth of the lives of those who died without innocence, and show you that even these can be understood. But he was wrong, they can't be understood, none of them are understood, speaking for the dead is only effective because the dead are silent and can't correct our mistakes. Ender is dead and he can't correct my mistakes, so some of you will think that I haven't made any, you will think that I tell the truth about him but the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they tell us is true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.
Plikt stood and practiced speaking desperately, hopelessly beside Ender's coffin, though he was not yet in a coffin, he was still lying on a bed and air was pumping through a clear mask into his mo
uth and glucose solution into his veins and he was not yet dead. Just silent.
"A word," she whispered. "A word from you."
Ender's lips moved.
Plikt should have called the others at once. Novinha, who was exhausted with weeping--she was only just outside the room. And Valentine, his sister; Ela, Olhado, Grego, Quara, four of his adopted children; and many others, in and out of the receiving room, wanting a glimpse of him, a word, to touch his hand. If they could send word to other worlds, how they would mourn, the people who remembered his speakings over the three thousand years of his journeys world to world. If they could proclaim his true identity--Speaker for the Dead, author of the two--no, the three--great books of Speaking; and Ender Wiggin, the Xenocide, both selves in the same frail flesh--oh, what shock waves would spread throughout the human universe.
Spread, widen, flatten, fade. Like all waves. Like all shocks. A note in the history books. A few biographies. Revisionist biographies a generation later. Encyclopedia entries. Notes at the end of translations of his books. That is the stillness into which all great lives fade.
His lips moved.
"Peter," he whispered.
He was silent again.
What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter? Or in some kind of delirium was he speaking to his brother the Hegemon? Or earlier, his brother as a boy. Peter, wait for me. Peter, did I do well? Peter, don't hurt me. Peter, I hate you. Peter, for one smile of yours I'd die or kill. What was his message? What should Plikt say about this word?
She moved from beside his bed. Walked to the door, opened it. "I'm sorry," she said quietly, facing a room full of people who had only rarely heard her speak, and some of whom had never heard a word from her. "He spoke before I could call anyone else to hear. But he might speak again."
"What did he say?" said Novinha, rising to her feet.
"A name is all," said Plikt. "He said 'Peter.' "
"He calls for the abomination he brought back from space, and not for me!" said Novinha. But it was the drugs the doctors had given her, that was what spoke, that was what wept.
"I think he calls for our dead brother," said Old Valentine. "Novinha, do you want to come inside?"
"Why?" Novinha said. "He hasn't called for me, he called for him."
"He's not conscious," said Plikt.
"You see, Mother?" said Ela. "He isn't calling for anyone, he's just speaking out of some dream. But it's something, he said something, and isn't that a good sign?"
Still Novinha refused to go into the room. So it turned out to be Valentine and Plikt and four of his adopted children who stood around his bed when his eyes opened.
"Novinha," he said.
"She's grieving outside," said Valentine. "Drugged to the gills, I'm afraid."
"That's all right," said Ender. "What happened? I take it I'm sick."
"More or less," said Ela. " 'Inattentive' is the more exact description of the cause of your condition, as best we can tell."
"You mean I had some kind of accident?"
"I mean you're apparently paying too much attention to what's going on on a couple of other planets, and so your body here is on the edge of self-destruction. What I see under the microscopes are cells sluggishly trying to reconstruct breaks in their walls. You're dying by bits, all over your body."
